2nd Unit : 4th Study Group Session

2nd Unit : 4th Study Group Session

Reading Genese by Michel Serres

On 23 January Shimizu Takashi presented a paper entitled "Reading Genese by Michel Serres" in Meeting room of School of Literature at the Hakusan Campus. Usually, when we form a judgment about something, we subsume it into a more universal grouping by discarding part of its individuality. This universal grouping is combined with still more universal groupings, one being superimposed on another, and it is on this basis that judgment and inference are considered to draw correct conclusions. This is a way of thinking that sequentially orders individual entities in the shape of a tree by means of their subsumption to the universal, and although it is in a certain sense a traditional way of thinking, it is also possible to take the position that it results in the discarding of true individuality and diversity. Serres, on the other hand, examines the conditions under which both individuality and diversity - the latter being "the many as they are" - can be grasped. According to Shimizu's analysis, Serres tries to envisage a situation in which multiple sequentially ordered structures become connected to one another through the medium of individuality even as their sequential ordering based on their subsumptive structure in the shape of a tree is delimited.

Genese dynamically describes with reference to Balzac's story "The Unknown Masterpiece" a structure in which mediacy through the universal (sequential ordering in the shape of a tree) and mediacy through the individual or diversity (noise) as it is both exist by moving back and forth between the workings of both without one being dissolved into the other. By passing alternately through these two kinds of mediacy a network - like world, swayed by diversity, is created, and Serres's aim is to consider in their diversity the individual entities tying this network together. While taking into account Leibnitz's monadology, Serres deals not with the harmony of sequentially ordered content, but questions what it means for the above system based on a reciprocal relationship to be compossible in a diverse form, and in this way he reinterprets monadology. This was a successful meeting, with a lively exchange of views on the points made by Shimizu.